Fidget

So, we had a few days of blissful freedom between the spring quarter and summer school. BN had been so focused on Analysis, Algebra, and Topology that he hadn’t really decided where we would go for our mini-vacation until Saturday, a few hours before we left. Hence, we packed up in a hurry (1.5 hours, a new record!). Hence I forgot the camera. So, the first trip we’ve been on since I started this blog but no pictures to post. Sorry about that.

Our destination was Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, in Southeastern Oregon. BN was excited because there were hotsprings, and the terrain was different from others we’ve visited - more desert-like and sagebrushy. Off we went!

Passing through the tiny town of Oakridge, we noticed a really-and-truly old-school A&W drive-up restaurant. We were starving (I was starving, I’m always hungry…) so we stopped. I’d never really eaten at a drive-up before (we actually ordered to go, but they did bring the food out to us… no roller skates, though) or even at A&W. Actually, it was good. The fries were exceptional. I looked at the take-out bag and noticed that it said, “All American Food.” I thought it was ironic that All American Food consists of Hamburgers and French fries. Yay for the melting pot.

We left in the late afternoon, so the first night we stopped part way at La Pine campground. We figured it must have been near a lake because the mosquitoes were pretty fierce. We hurredly boiled some water and ate our freeze-dried evening snack in the safety of our tent. Little did we know how our perception of the ferocity level of mosquitoes was about to be completely changed… (menacing soundtrack… buh-buh-BUH…)

Day 2

The HMNAR is truly in the middle of nowhere. And it’s beautiful. I was so impressed with the colors - rolling hills with a smooth coating of sagebrush, a lovely shade of you guessed it - sage green! Lots of wildflowers, and a clear blue sky (how we’ve learned to appreciate those, living in the misty Willamette valley for a few years now). We arrived at midday, after a bumpy ride over a gravel road (but not as bad as we’d feared - go Honda, go!) and a visit to the ranger station, we picked out a nice campsite near the creek, which had a bit of shade. We spent a lazy afternoon, mostly inside the tent because there were quite a few mosquitoes considering it was the middle of the day.

Late in the day we ventured out to the hot springs. The official one, with the stone enclosure, was occupied so we went to the “natural” one whose only development was a sign that said, “soap and shampoo prohibited.” For good reason - it was as hot as a bathtub, in fact hotter - more like a hot tub where you feel the need to get out and get your body temperature back to normal every once in a while. Wow! It was an amazing experience to be sitting out in a totally natural water setting, and feel as hot as in a spa. But I could tell the difference - the heat felt more wild, more intense. I could sense the power of the earth in that heat, not just some electric or gas power.

We cooked Indian food: chicken curry in coconut milk and orange juice with raisins, served with rice and supplemented with one of those Indian dishes in the foil pouch. We are rockin’ camping gourmets! However, the only reason we were able to stay outside and cook in the fading light was our trusty bug-net-hats. The skeeters were out in force - clouds of them around our heads, quarter-sized patches of them clustered on our backs, trying to suck our blood right through the 2 or 3 layers of clothing we wore. Needless to say, we dined in the tent, after chasing down and killing the half dozen mosquitoes that managed to ride in with us. After dark we re-emerged, washed the dishes, and enjoyed some wine and chocolate by the campfire. Relief at last.

Day 3

So, we’d been planning to backpack up to the plateau-peaks of Hart Mountain. We expected there to be fewer, if any, mosquitoes since there was also no water - we planned on melting some snow from the various patches up there for our water source. After a snack-breakfast (in the tent again, the mosquitoes were up bright and early) we packed up our loads and set out to hike. It was another beautiful day, but not too hot which was good because once we left our base camp there was no shade anywhere. The two-lane tire-track trail was fairly steep, but easy to walk on. There were at least two dozen varieties of wildflowers - ranging in color from white, pale pink, and yellow to deep purple and clear blue. There were large daisy-style flowers and wild irises, down to tiny blossoms with 1/16th-inch petals. I saw huge yellow-and-black butterflies, medium size black-with-color-accents, and tiny blue ones that traveled in flocks. A smooth patchwork of grayish, pale, and bright greens was spread over the hilly landscape. Layer after layer of sculpted blue hills and mountains were visible on the horizon. We saw our first solitary antelope as we reached the top, and set up camp in the shelter of an outcropping of rock. The view was tremendous, we felt like we were on top of the world.

We took our handy “camp sink” collapsible bucket, and scraped it full of snow. Then the tedious task of melting the snow began. It’s inefficient to just heat snow over a backpacking stove, so what we did is heat the water we had left and poured it over snow in our small bowls, and floated some snow in the remainder and pumped it through our handy filtration system. Repeated this many times. We felt like real survivalists, extracting water from a non-liquid source!

To our vast disappointment, the mosquitoes were as bad as ever. Worse, in fact. We cooked in bug hats, ate in the tent, and stayed put until just before sunset when we risked a venture out to view the show.

Day 4

By this time, word had gotten around among the countless mosquito population of our 10-mile radius that there were two live, juicy humans camped up near the rocks. Safe in my bug hat, but barely able to hear myself think over the collective buzz of whiny mosquitoes, I frantically stirred our freeze-dried omelette to keep it from burning and just as frantically picked the little buggers out of the pan. I devoured most of the omelette in the tent, (and it was delicious in flavor, if a little funny in texture) but BN doesn’t really take to eggs so he stayed outside and decided to see how many mosquitoes he could kill. He just had to stand there, and beat them against his body with his bare hands. The carnage was unbelievable.
And get this: the day before, the mosquitoes hadn’t been bad while we were hiking. We figured they didn’t like moving targets. Well, on the way down I kept my bug hat and multiple layers of loose clothing on because they followed us home! It took emotional energy just to stand up under that kind of onslaught. I felt as tired as I would have if we’d been hiking all day rather than just a few hours.
So much for our plan to stay another night at the base camp. We decided to get out while the getting was good. We dipped in the main hotspring (ahh, that felt good) suffered a few more mosquito bites while changing into clean clothes (nice stone wall for privacy) and drove away from our enemies. On our way out, we saw a mini-herd of antelope (3 of the cuties) and a huge bird-of-prey just perched on the fence all nonchalant-like. Nice!

Driving down to the lowlands, we saw for the second time the Dead Marshes (I swear they filmed the Lord of the Rings there) - miles of marshy land and pools of water, just over the mountain from the Antelope Refuge. It was beautiful in the midday sun, and looked much the same as it had on our way in, but now we thought, oh… that must be where all those billions of mosquitoes came from. They just traveled really far in their bloodlust.

I also wonder about our timing… like maybe there would have been fewer mosquitoes just a week soon or later than we were there. I sincerely hope it’s not like that all summer, for the sake of those poor antelope.

Postscript

Now that we are home, summer has begun here in Eugene and we’ve been eating dinner outside on our deck every night. Oh, the irony!

I decided we earned a few Scout badges on this adventure. I couldn’t find one about mosquitoes so I designed it myself.

I was a teenager in the mid-90’s, but I had never seen Forrest Gump until now in my late 20’s. I felt like I had heard all about it, mostly from my friend PF who quoted from it constantly and was an aspiring movie-maker himself. But, finally watching it for myself, I really was surprised about a lot of elements and plot events in the movie. Of course there are lots of funny parts (”So, I went to the White House, again, and met the President, again…” “What is your sole purpose here, Gump?!” “To do whatever you tell me to do, when you tell me to do it, drill sergeant”) But on the whole it’s quite tragic. I was struck with how, even after all he went through, Forrest was still so innocent and naive. Maybe he was “too dumb” to ever be bad. Also, his Mama really loved him and tried her best to start him out right. On the other hand, Jenny had such a bad start, got herself into more and more bad situations, and barely learned about what real love means before it was too late. She never had any innocence or naivete to start out with, and just went downhill from there.

Sometimes, there just aren’t enough rocks.

One thing I really appreciate about this movie is the subtle and clever connections between all its different parts. Nothing ruins a movie for me like putting emphasis on some detail or imbuing a scene with meaning, and then you never see or hear about it again. I want to see lots of witty, meaningful self-referential “inside jokes” as a movie viewer. I think this is how my sense of humour works in general, and I find it especially entertaining in movies. Forrest Gump is full of this and I love that. Here’s the perfect example: Gump’s commanding officer from Vietnam, Leutenant Dan, is very bitter and cynical after war - Forrest saved his life but both legs were amputated above the knee. In response to Gump’s plan to become a shrimp-boat captain to honor the dying wish of his comrade Bubba (”shrimp soup… shrimp gumbo… fried shrimp… sauteed shrimp…”) Dan says, “the day you become a shrimp boat captain is the day I become an astronaut.” So then, at the very end of the movie, after Forrest and Dan have long since ended their days of success in the shrimp industry and are reunited once again, Dan has new leg prostheses made of “titanium, just like they used in the space shuttle.” That, my friends, is true movie excellence.

by Oliver Sacks

Reading this book felt sort of like fate, because I’d first heard of the author several years ago while chatting with a co-worker about his current book club reading. I was intrigued by the title, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and even more intrigued when I was told that it wasn’t fiction - Sacks is a neurologist and writes about real people. A different co-worker at the same job (don’t know if he was in the same book club) once described one of Sacks’s subjects who is autistic but has an incredible affinity with animals, particularly cattle, and designs more humane “animal management systems.” This is a chapter in Anthropologist, as I learned a few weeks ago when chatting with my friend GP and she brought up the same story. So, I borrowed the book!

I was completely fascinated, reading the true stories of people like the Abstract Expressionist painter who loses his ability to see color. He couldn’t even remember what color looked like after the injury to his brain. Then there’s the surgeon who has Tourette’s syndrome - with extreme lunges and “tic” gesturing at all times, even while he’s driving, except when he’s operating. I had heard of Tourette’s many times but never really knew much about it. And there are several stories about autism - I learned a lot from these as well.

Sacks writes these case studies as a knowledgeable but sympathetic and sensitive observer. He clearly explains the patient’s situation and doesn’t hide the sad, “disabling” aspects of the brain conditions. But, he also does justice to the extraordinary, “super-human” traits that the patients have and how these elevate them to a plane that is just as human, but very different, from a normal person. As a neurologist he is of course interested in them as subjects of study, but he values them as people and friends and tries very hard to spend some “real life” time with them. Readers benefit from this and are able to get to know these unique individuals as well.

I’m all registered! On July 4th (yikes, less than a month away) I’m planning to attempt my first 10K run. My only uncertainty is the first half mile - it’s a steep uphill and I’m not sure I’ll be able to run 5.7 more miles after that. I live at the top of the actual hill, so I get plenty of opportunities to practice, anytime I walk or run anywhere from my house I have to go up it to get home. I’ve been running up, and then running 2+ miles afterwards, and I’ve run 5 (level) continuous miles several weekends in a row now. So hopefully those two training regimens will be enough to prepare me for the race. My goal is to finish, running!

by Daphne du Maurier

I’m notorious for burning through exciting novels. I just can’t help it - I’m a fast reader and also a sucker for a good story. So once I have that itch to find out what happens next, it’s way to late for BN to remind me how I should be savoring the experience.

Rebecca was recommended to me by my mom as a great story with an exciting plot twist in it. Yep, she was right. (This isn’t going to be a very good book review, because I can’t tell you a thing about it. I’d hate to spoil the surprises for you.)

The story is told in the first person, by a young woman (whose name is not Rebecca) who lets us in on all her inner thoughts. She is very observant and perceptive, and I enjoyed reading her descriptions of people, her soul searching, and “deep thoughts” about memory, destiny, and “living in the moment.” Well, you might wonder, if Rebecca isn’t the main character, who is she? Well, I won’t say who but what: mysterious, beautiful, tragic, menacing…

I sometimes weigh the success of a work of art (images, writing, music…) by how well it makes me feel, see, or learn what the protagonists are feeling, seeing, or learning (whether that’s the main character or the author.) In this book, the narrator tells us what she’s feeling of course, but deeper than that, all the descriptions and dialog really pull the reader in and make you experience things along with her. I like that.

The book is set in the early 20th century, the late teens or early twenties. They have cars and telephones, but it’s still a different world, a good balance between recent and distant history. I enjoyed reading about the lifestyles of the rich and famous - spending summers in Monte Carlo and returning to their vast estates in rural England with a different room for each hour of the day, servants who have been with the family for generations, and masquerade balls for 500 guests. A good contrast to this opulence is our heroine, who is as new to the wealthy lifestyle as I would be and seeing it through her eyes is an enjoyable and entertaining experience. And, though my lips are sealed on the details, the storyline is intriguing, suspenseful and hauntingly memorable. Read it soon and let me know what you think!

We had a lovely visit with my grandparents. They were enroute to a wedding, north of us. We picked them up at their RV camp and the 5 of us (they had JP with them) crammed into our Miracle Honda and went out for dinner. Earlier in the day, BN and I had discussed where we should go to to eat since, as a stomach cancer survivor, Grandpa can’t really eat spicy food. That wasn’t actually the worst of our concerns though, since the main problem about where to eat in Eugene is, is there any good food in Eugene?

Now, BN and I don’t eat out very much. Certainly not as much as some people. We are fairly frugal and now that I work part time, and that at home, I love to cook! So those are reasons that we don’t eat out much in Eugene. But another, distressing reason, is that we really haven’t had very many good experiences dining out in this town. It makes one gun-shy to have so many disappointing meals. The one place that is mostly consistently good (they did burn my food once) is Jung’s Mongolian Barbecue. Yay for all-you-can eat fresh-cooked stir fry. You know that eating-out phenomenon - people tend to go to a few favorite restaurant and always order the same thing at the same place? With us, when we feel like eating out, it really means we are craving Mongolian yummyness. So, preferring a predictably good and economic experience over risking one’s cash and appetite, we go to Jung’s.

So we can’t say we’ve tried all Eugene has to offer, cuisine-wise, but we’ve tried enough to make us suspect that Eugene is the black hole of university town dining diversity. Take for instance, Taste of India. The name sounded promising, and once we arrived it even looked promising. Everything from the silk flowers and framed photos of the Taj Mahal, to the table linens and glass water goblets, looked just like the numerous delicious Indian restaurants we’d been to in the Bay Area. The employees were Indian. We were all set for a real Taste of India. But, the food was - even the memory is a shock - bland. Oily, bland, and such a disappointment. Actually, BN and I have both been to India. We know what it tastes like there, and this was not it. Around Thanksgiving last year, we found a goldmine on the $4.99 clearance table at Border’s - The Best Ever Curry Cookbook. These days, if we want a taste of India, we cook it ourselves.

I have a weakness for Chinese food. I mentioned before that BN and I don’t eat out much, but that was not the case for me when I was single. I worked full time in Sunnyvale and Mountain View, both packed full of wonderful ethnic cuisine, and it often seemed I was too busy even to grocery shop and pack lunch. So I ate out a lot, and was a regular at Lucky Chinese cafe in MV. It was just the typical cafeteria 3-item lunch plate to go deal, but man it was good. If I had to pick my favorite Chinese restaurant, it would be Chef Li in Campbell. Tasty, non-greasy, great prices, and soup and eggrolls are included. Nice atmosphere for sit-down dining.
Soon after we moved here, BN and I went out to China Blue. I don’t remember it being that bad but he felt sick after eating there so needless to say we haven’t returned. Recently we tried Louie’s Village and that was possibly the worst Chinese food I have ever experienced. I shudder at the recollection. How I long for a tasty, quick lunch stop at Lucky or a special dinner date at Chef Li.

So, once all the belts were buckled in our circus-capacity Hatchback, we asked my Grandpa where he would like to eat. We had selected an Italian, a Mexican, and a Thai for him to choose from, having rave reviews from friends on the Italian, I’d eaten lunch at the Mexican, and we’d eaten several times at the Thai and it was really quite good. Somewhat to my surprise, Grandpa opted for Thai. So we went to Tasty Thai Kitchen and ordered a selection of dishes that were very flavorful but not very spicy, which was just fine with Grandpa who washed them down with a tall one of milk. Everybody enjoyed it, and the conversation was pleasant. It had cleared up late in the day and the clouds and sky were pretty colors outside. Very nice.

I suppose I haven’t completely given up on Eugene Cuisine, but if you want anything really spicy, you’re going to have to come to my house.

This is the second time I’ve seen this movie, and I’m glad I did because it is very subtle so having a previous viewing (more than a year ago) helped me to enjoy it more this time.

I was all excited to watch a movie that’s based on a painting! What a cool idea. But, it’s actually based on a novel which I assume is based on the painting. Oh, well.

I really like Vermeer’s work, so the movie is a treat because many of the scenes look like paintings (Vermeers, in fact.) The composition, camera angles, and lighting are great. Even the experience of watching the movie is sort of like viewing a painting, because you really have to pay attention to the nuances as the story gradually unfolds and even so, many things are left to the imagination.

The movie is full of contrast, visual and otherwise. The most striking contrast is between the innocent, barely-there attraction and tension between the girl and the artist, and then the undisguised lust of the rich patron who is convinced that much more than painting is going on in Vermeer’s studio and really wants a piece of that action.

Beautiful visuals, good character development, and an interesting story-behind-the-famous-painting. I loved it! I’ll have to read the novel next.